Video: Filtering and finding layers

Here we're going to take a look at, perhaps, one of the most powerful and helpful features in the Layers panel, and it's a feature which allows us to filter in to find our Layers panel. You know, one of the problems with Photoshop is that it's just a ton of fun. It's easy to get carried away and to create all of these different layers. Well, this new filtering feature can help you find and manage your layers in a really fascinating way. You may remember in the previous movie we created this new layer, branches copy. Yet at the end we decided not to use this layer, and you know this happens all the time in our workflows.

Watch the Online Video Course Photoshop CS6 for Photographers New Features

3h 33mIntermediateApr 23, 2012Updated Dec 11, 2012

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This course explores the newest version of Photoshop from a photographer's perspective—helping users of previous versions of Photoshop make upgrade decisions and get up to speed with CS6. Author Chris Orwig covers the improvements to Camera Raw, including the improved exposure controls, Adjustment Brush tool, and Lens Correction filter. He then addresses the enhancements in Photoshop, such as the new Layer panel behavior, which makes renaming and organizing layers almost effortless, and image-editing features like content-aware retouching, photorealistic blur effects, and redefined nondestructive cropping; plus the brand-new ability to edit video in Photoshop. The final chapter addresses the new Creative Cloud subscription option, detailing features of interest to photographers: the enhanced Blur Gallery and Liquify filters, conditional actions, and improvements to the Crop tool.

Filtering and finding layers

Here we're going to take a look at, perhaps, one of the most powerful and helpfulfeatures in the Layers panel, and it's a feature which allows us to filter in tofind our Layers panel.You know, one of the problems with Photoshop is that it's just a ton of fun.It's easy to get carried away and to create all of these different layers.Well, this new filtering feature can help you find and manage your layersin a really fascinating way.You may remember in the previous movie we created this new layer, branches copy.Yet at the end we decided not to use this layer, and you know this happens allthe time in our workflows.

We get carried away, and at the end of our workflow we have all of these layersthat we're not using.All the visibility has been turned off.Well, it might be helpful to get rid of those layers in order to clean up ourLayers panel and also in order to decrease our file size for a document.Well, we can now do that with the layer filtering.If you go to the top of the Layers panel, you'll notice you havea Filtering pulldown menu.I'm going to start off by navigating to Attribute.When we do that, we'll see some options on the right.

We can choose different attributes here.In this case we'll choose the attribute Not Visible.This will then show me all of the layers in my document which have thevisibility turned off.What you could do is you could then select those layers, then press Delete or Backspace.This would clean up your file and also decrease your file size.Well, how else can we filter or find layers?Let's go back to this pulldown menu.Well, with this image, one of the things that I realized at this point is whileI've cleaned up my Layers panel, I want to make a few more creative adjustments,and I know that somewhere inside of all of these groups I have some sort of acolor adjustment, but I just can't find it.

Well, you can filter by Kind. And let's say with this image I want to makethis more red, and I could go and select this icon which allows me to see my adjustment layers.There is my Color Balance adjustment.Double-click it, make the needed adjustment-- in this case to increase the red--and then I can close this panel and be on my way.In other words, this filtering, it allows me to see specific layers.Once I'm done with this filtering--or you can either flip the toggle switch todisable this or turn it off, or you can click on the icon or the type offiltering that you applied.

There are other types of filtering which might be helpful as well.For example, let's go down to Blending mode.Remember when we previously applied a blending mode of Soft Light?Well, here we could choose a blending mode and then filter based on that typeand this will show us all of our layers with this blending mode.Here we might decide to click on one of these and perhaps increase theopacity of those layers.Or we could also change the blending mode.So again, this gives us this control to access these files or these layers, ratherthan having to click through and find them.

Another way that's really helpful to do some filtering is to search by the layer name.Here I'll go ahead and highlight that briefly.If you click on Name, you can then type in a layer name.Here I know I have a layer named sky.I could type that in, or we could search for other names.For example, you can just start to type out some words.In this case I'll type out B for branch.Notice that it shows you all of the different layers which start off with this letter.Then I'll go ahead and continue to type out, and eventually it's going to getdown to show me just this particular layer.

The advantage of this is that, again, it gives you really quick access to your layers.Once you're done with any of this filtering, well, you can just flip the toggle switchto go back to an unfiltered view of your layers.So as you can see here, this new layering functionality can be really helpful.It can allow you to access and to find different layers, and this can be helpful,whether you're looking to clean something up or make a change or correction toyour file, or if you just want to creatively explore different options.So if you haven't experimented with the layer filtering, I definitelyrecommend you do so, because I think it has the potential to be a great helpto your workflow.

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Q: This course was updated on 12/11/12. What changed?

A: We added an additional chapter, "Creative Cloud Updates December 2012," to cover the new features rolled out with the Creative Cloud subscription model for Photoshop, including the Blur Gallery and Smart Filters' new impact on still images, and the abilities to blur video, change image size and resolution with the Crop tool, and use conditional actions to add watermarks to your images.

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